Top level numbers:

Hey Val, here’s the numbers for Power-On:

Where are their leads from?:

The ratio of 42:1 for leads to sits seems a bit high. So I became curious if maybe they were pulling in leads from unusual areas. Maybe places that rarely get any attention. I could already see that they were targeting the whole state for ads (no zip code targeting, just the whole state), and was curious if that was resulting in far flung leads.

So I tried to pull specifics on where their leads originated from. Unfortunately, I can’t get any info on where their leads came from. Probably because of Apple making it difficult to track off app activity these days. For example, for their most successful ad, all the leads came from a “designated market area” that is unknown:

We can however get most of the info on which geographical areas they were spending in, at least at a coarse level. For example, for the same ad:

The spend is broken down by “dma.” Dma is a “designated market area,” which is a way of breaking down areas that was developed by the Nielson company (the same co that measures tv ratings):

As we can see, the dma areas are pretty broad and inclusive. “Phoenix” is like half of Az. Here’s the spend for all their ads, broken down by dma:

If we group into “Phoenix” vs outside Phoenix, we get:

We can see that most of their spend went into the “Phoenix” area, but given that they weren’t using zip code level targeting, it’s hard to say where exactly that spend was. Seems likely that they were spending in lots of places we usually don’t target. The fact that any money at all was spent in the “Alburquerque-Santa Fe, NM-AZ” dma (top right area in the map) would suggest this.

Of the leads that were entered into Amps, 4 of them (50%) were in zips that were in the bottom 50% of zips in terms of sales, and 2 were in areas that we have no prior sales in.

Looking closer at the ads:

The top 3 performing ads generated the majority of their leads (59 out of 83, so ~72%), with the majority of ads getting 0:

If we breakdown the distribution of spend over these 3 ads, we see basically the same story:

And again:

So we don’t see them shifting their geographic targeting at this point to be more focused. It continues to be very broad.

What do the ads that generated most of the leads look like?:

Ordered from most leads to least:

Some thoughts

I’ve thought for a while that it seem like there are two approaches to generating leads that marketers use:

  1. Higher quality leads, higher cost, lower volume.
  2. Lower quality leads, lower cost, higher volume.

They’d be pursuing the latter. This may help explain the relatively high leads to sits ratio we see for Power On. They keep their production costs as low as possible (static images, probably sourced from Google), make some somewhat unclear claims (“Get BATTERIES included for no cost down!”; “eligible zip code”; etc), and this helps to generate lots and lots of leads. The downside is they tend be less likely to sit and close. Which is fine I guess if you generate enough leads; it’s just a different strategy. What I wonder is if they used to be able to produce hundreds of leads, for the same budget, in the past, or in other states. I don’t know, just a possibility. It could also be that they’ll continue to work their lead sheet, and things will improve.

Choice of strategy, along with very broad geographic targeting, possibly explains the results we’ve seen. Plus, they possibly just got unlucky with their timing. Maybe if they’d run these a couple months earlier or later, they would have done better.

So I’d guess that maybe if they were to try again, we could supply them with lists of zips to target, rather than advertising to the whole state. Also, maybe some guidelines about language, so they aren’t creating hazy expectations (how might a consumer interpret “BONUS: Get BATTERIES included for no cost down!”?)